Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting 2016 in pictures

There is something truly magical about Lindau, the home for the annual Nobel laureates meeting. It might be because you feel as though you’re on the set of a movie — the cobblestones in the quaint pavements are arrayed like small rainbows; everyone is eating gelato and, well, you’re on an island in the middle of a huge fresh water lake in Germany. There’s a surreal element to the experience.

There was “work” (above) — sessions in which Nobel laureates spoke about their research, and then there was play (below). Meet (from the left) Luyanda, Sphumelele and Siyambonga. They were the best thing about the trip. This was when we went to Austria for the evening. As one does.

Many people were the victims of my “lang arm” photography technique (in South Africa, we’ve been doing the group selfie for ages. We call it the “lang arm” – Afrikaans for “long arm”.)

No one was safe …

Sphumelele Ndlovu, UKZN PhD candidate and all around ninja …

Vinton Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet and a man who destroyed productivity forever …

George Smoot, who won a Nobel prize for discovering the cosmic microwave radiation background.

On the final day, they took us to another island, Mainau Island. And a castle. I felt a bit like Alice in Wonderland.

Sarah Wild is a multiaward-winning science journalist. She studied physics, electronics and English literature at Rhodes University in an effort to make herself unemployable. It didn't work and she now writes about particle physics, cosmology and everything in between.
Sarah was the science editor for both Business Day and the Mail & Guardian before moving on to WildOnScience, and the world of freelance writing and training.
In 2012 she published her first full-length non-fiction book, Searching African Skies: The Square Kilometre Array and South Africa's Quest to Hear the Songs of the Stars.
In 2015 she published her second non-fiction book, Innovation: Shaping South Africa through Science.